Since the release of iOS 8, Apple has allowed the use of app widgets on the Today Screen in the Notification Center. One of the more interesting widgets I’ve seen lately is “Glimpse” from developer Arno Appenzeller. Glimpse allows you to take your favorite webpages and turn them into auto-refreshing widgets for your Today screen.
Adding a page to Glimpse can be easily done in one of two ways: You can either enter a title and URL for the page from within the Glimpse app, or the way I’ve come to prefer: Via Safari by tapping the “forward” icon and then tapping the “Add Page to Glimpse” icon.
Once you tap the “Add Page to Glimpse” icon, you can then select the portion of the page you’d like to view in the widget, by dragging a selection tool up and down, and by scrolling the webpage until you’ve lassoed the portion to display.
Once the page widget is on display in your Today screen list, you can tap the widget, and then tap the Refresh icon on the left to manually refresh the widget to make sure you have the latest version of the page on display, or tap the icon on the right to go directly to the page in Safari. The widget also includes a handy notifier showing when the widget was last refreshed.
If you have more than one website saved to the Glimpse widget, you can cycle between the sites via handy left and right arrows built into the widget.
Features of Glimpse Include:
- The Ability to Add a Page to the Notification Center
- When adding you can scroll and zoom to a certain area of the page. The widget keeps this position, so that you are always in the right place (Note: Glimpse works best with mobile optimized webpages)
- Individual refresh intervals for Wi-Fi and mobile data
- You can open webpages from inside the Widget
- Add a page directly from Safari with the Glimpse Safari Extension
I found the Glimpse widget quite handy while trying it out.
Glimpse is available in the iOS App Store for the iPhone and iPad for the price of $2.99 – [DIRECT LINK]
